Transcriber: Omar Estaitih Ávila Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
I started to work in book publishing
about ten years ago.
I was a book publicist,
so I talked to book reviewers.
I talked to television producers.
I talked to book stores and libraries,
but I never talked directly to readers,
and I never heard back from readers
because as an average publisher, ten years ago,
-- it was before the Internet --
so we started hearing how worried we should be
how the Web was coming to ruin everyone's attention span
and give an endless stream of worthless free content.
And no one is ever going to read a book again!
And over the last ten years,
I have been an author, a book seller,
and an editor and I've really seen the opposite.
The more tools that we get for communication and collaboration,
the more we are taking reading and writing
these really solitary pursuits,
and building communities around them
for connection and conversation.
So I wanted to tell you about a few cool projects
that have grown out of these changes.
The first one I worked on probably
was called "the Six Word Memoire Project".
It started out as a little blog post that I wrote
for an online magazine
and we asked people to tell their life story in six words.
It was a non-fiction twist on Hemingway's
probably apocryphal six-word novel,
"For sale: baby shoes, never worn",
but we asked people to tell their own lives,
sort of a twist for our voyeuristic exhibitionistic age.
And we put up this online contest
and really soon we had thousands of them
from professional writers, from elementary schools
and support groups, and church groups
and grandmothers...
and we got a book deal to publish an anthology.
It was really a little book deal as these things go,
and as soon as we signed,
we kind of turned around immediately
and we're like "Oh we're gonna need 800 author copies?"
The only reason I know that was an innovation was
how crazy they thought I was to ask for it.
But this book had 800 contributors!
And so, we sent a copy to every single person
who had written six words of the book
and a letter that said "congratulations!
You are a published author.
Here is your book.
Here is how to throw yourself a book party
Here is how to do a signing at the book store
Here is how to get interviewed on the radio and in your local paper."
And having this army of people
who cared about the book
was an incredibly effective strategy.
That book was a New York Times' Best Seller.
We got a deal to do a sequel, and another one,
and another one. And a board game and a calendar...
We were on NPR and on national TV and in the New Yorker,
and it was crazy!
And what I took away from that project is that
not everything you do is going to have 800 contributors,
but everything you do has people
who care about it and are invested in it,
and the best thing you can do is
empower these people
to be as much a part of it as they want to be.
And you use that same strategy to run a business.
I was the director of public programs
at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe.
So I was putting on poetry readings
and book launches and panels and concerts...
200 events a year.
And anyone who has ever worked in a non-profit
can probably guess what my marketing budget was:
it was nothing.
So I started using all these free internet tools.
I became a digital media professional in the basement of a used bookstore.
We were the first book store to be on Tumblr.
And it made an incredible difference for us.
We went really quickly from this kind of local, best kept secret,
dusty little thing, to something people really knew about.
They knew what we were about,
and we were got called by newspapers
when they wanted a comment on the future of the book event,
we'd be in slideshows on the best independent bookstores in the country...
I get Google alerts from people's blogs that said things like,
"Oh I've never been to New York City,
but Housing Works is my favorite bookstore!
Someday I'm gonna go there."
So that's the power of giving your organization a voice!
And now Ithat I work at Tumbler
helping all different kinds of literary organizations
to use those tools,
I'm a total true believer because I've seen what it did for us.
My specialty now is all those places
where the Internet and the book world kind of mash together.
And it's amazing me to think about how recently
publishers didn't hear back from readers.
And authors talk to their fans maybe once a year on a book tour.
And bookstore didn't have personalities you could know about
if you didn't go to them all the time.
I even think that we are changing the definition of local.
My local bookstore used to be just the one closest to my house.
And now it takes some extra subways to go to one of these feels like me
where I agree with their staff picks and I laugh at their jokes.
That kind of match-making works for publishers and authors too
So when I was a book publicist,
you had to go wide.
You had to get on the Today Show and The Time's book review
and put up a billboard and hope that 1% of the people who saw it
actually cared about the book you were trying to sell.
Now authors can go directly to the people
who are most likely to like their books.
You can go to on Goodreads and see who gave five stars to your last book
or your favorite book.
You can go on Tumbler and do tag searches for different writers.
I met a woman recently who is writing a book
about how to cook organic food from scratch for your dog.
Does everybody want that book? No.
But the people who want it really want it.
And now you can go online and find them.
We didn't have that opportunity when I started doing this.
That kind of sub-culture marketing is enabling entirely new businesses.
One of the recently launched in Brooklyn is called Emily Books.
It's an independent ebook store.
They sell one title a month.
Something by an underrated female writer who deserves a broader audience.
And they package it with interviews and essays and live book clubs.
You don't subscribe because you know you are going to love
every single book they put out,
but because you are joining this group of people
who are smart and like-minded,
and probably going to make your life better.
Some people don't live in New York.
If you are a high school student
in a small town with no bookstore,
now you just go online and find someone
who wants to talk about the same obscure writer that you do.
Earlier this year I launched a re-blog book club,
which is an online book club that lives on Tumblr,
and the first book we discussed is called
The Fangirl
It's a book about a girl who writes fan fiction.
So we brought together this online literary community
to talk about a book, about an online literary community.
And it was not just teenagers.
It was college students, and librarians and teachers
and they didn't just talk about the book.
They also created their own work from reading the book.
So fan fiction, and fan art and playlists of music
to listen to for certain characters...
People did nail art to match the book cover,
or decorated cakes for the publication day,
and then they took those things and put them back online
for everyone else to enjoy and the author responded to them too.
That was unimaginable when I was a teenage fan girl.
One author who is really amazing at this is John Green,
he is the No.1 New York Times Best Seller.
He is a YouTube star.
He has 2 million Twitter followers.
His most recent book is called "The Fault in Our Stars"
and when it was first announced, the preorders went crazy.
People put up count down blogs to count down the days
until it was going to come out.
They took the book cover and they photoshoped it
into the creation of Adam and the Obama inauguration
so he was being sworn in on "The Fault in Our Stars"
instead of the Bible.
And then, when one of the retailers sent the books early by accident,
people didn't read it.
They duck-taped the packages back together, and they bike-locked them,
they stuffed them in the freezer
and they took pictures of that
and put that online to show everyone else that
the important thing was not reading the book
the very first second you could.
The important thing was reading it together.
Later John and his brother Hank put on a reading and show at Carnegie Hall,
they sold out 3,000 seats.
All these people had this real life experience together
around the book.
And then we partnered with his publisher to put on a free live stream.
So now you can be part of this event from anywhere in the world.
And we invited book stores and libraries to register on Tumbler
to have official meet-up watching parties.
So now you had 200 other locations all over the world
where people were having face-to-face interactions
but enabled by online tools.
Here in Brooklyn we're really lucky.
We've got Bookcourt in Carroll Gardens,
we got community bookstores in Park Slope and Green Light in Fort Greene,
and so many others.
The bookstores that are thriving right now
aren't trying to compete with Amazon on price, or convenient or selection.
They know they are not going to do that.
They are competing on the things that they do better than anybody else.
Smart book sellers who get to know you and your taste,
great curation, great events,
a place in the community to get together,
personality and online presence
that can show all those advantages to a wider audience.
So all that is to say that I find the idea
that books and the Internet are in opposition to each other
kind of preposterous.
And everything I have done in the last ten years,
online culture and literary culture enhance each other
and enable each other.
You have little bookstores that are finding
new audiences and new loyalties.
You have authors reaching out directly to the people
who are going to be most excited about their books.
And you have readers reaching out to each other
to talk about writing and life.
So now we are figuring out
the next ten years of publishing together.
We are more democratized
and we are more accessible.
and we are connecting writers with readers
more effectively than ever before.
Thank you.
(Applause)